‘I loved the sense of unity we all felt when both young men and women helped each other during the march protest,’ said Taghreed al-Barawi, seen in the photo [Mohammed Salem/Reuters]

Gaza Strip – On one side of the fence, dozens of Israeli soldiers lay positioned behind sand dunes, tracking the Palestinian demonstrators through the crosshairs of their snipers.

On the other side, young women, with keffiyeh scarves covering half their faces to avoid tear gas suffocation, stand in front of the young protesting men, providing cover.

“Women are less likely to be shot at,” said 26-year-old Taghreed al-Barawi on April 13, while attending the third consecutive Friday protests in Gaza near the Israeli border with her younger sister and a group of friends.

“We live in a male-dominated society and women’s participation in protests can be a strange scene for some people in Gaza. However, this time men somehow were more accepting and encouraging. It seems like they finally realised that we’re all part of this and women should be present,” Barawi said.

Join us in campaigning to protect child prisoners on the 17th April, marking the International Day of Solidarity with Palestinian Prisoners.

We need you to help raise awareness of the mistreatment of Palestinian children by sharing our ready made infographics on your social media throughout tomorrow. Please post 2 or 3 of the images at the end of this email, also to be found on our website, with the hashtag #freechildprisoners .

Please also take the opportunity to write to Congress to ensure that pressure remains for action in holding Israel accountable for violating the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC).

Under Israeli Military Detention, Palestinian children as young as 12 are routinely:

• Taken from their homes in night time raids at gunpoint
• Blindfolded, bound and shackled
• Interrogated without a lawyer or relative and with no audio-visual recording
• Put into solitary confinement
• Forced to sign confessions – often in Hebrew, a language they do not understand

Children shouldn’t have to fight against the injustices of occupation, which is why they need our support. Please lend your voice on twitter and facebook, and also write to Congress.

Two of the Gaza Strip’s most pressing challenges are a blockade-induced shortage of both electricity and building materials. And, in this conservative, patriarchal society, it’s a young, female engineer who is tackling both.

Twenty-four-year-old Majd al-Mashharawi, a 2016 graduate in civil engineering, first figured out how to turn ash and rubble—of which Gaza has a lot—into a material she calls “Green Cake” that can replace cement. Now, she is turning her attention to renewable energy technologies, starting with a solar kit named SunBox. Now in the piloting phase, SunBox is, she says, the first off-the-grid solar kit in Gaza.

“Gaza has an extreme shortage of electricity—receiving just three to six hours a day. But the entire Middle East suffers from a lack of sufficient electricity,” Mashharawi says. “This severely affects both quality of life and opportunity for economic growth. But the region has a resource that can be harnessed—an average of 320 days of sunshine a year, making solar energy an ideal source of electricity production.”

Mashharawi researched solar options in use in Africa and India, where electricity outages also are common. However, she ended up turning to China for the most applicable solution. Her SunBox product is a small solar energy collection kit she imports, modifies to accommodate local electrical outlets and voltage and sells for US$355—a price her market research shows is affordable to most households. (She hopes to partner with microfinance businesses for those families who need to pay in installments.) The kit generates 1,000 watts of electricity—enough to power four lamps, two laptops, two phones, an internet router and a TV/fan/small refrigerator for a full day, before needing a “refresh” (using either the sun or the electrical grid, when available).

Mashharawi (far right) using a SunBox to power a light and laptop

If the Gaza launch goes well, Mashharawi is already dreaming of expanding into other markets—West Bank refugee camps, Syrians in Jordan and off-grid Bedouin communities throughout the Middle East (perhaps the largest of the populations, at an estimated 3.2 million).

Palestinian Journeys is an online portal into the multiple facets of the Palestinian experience, filled with fact-based historical accounts, biographies, events, and undiscovered stories. Together, they seek to craft an ever-growing comprehensive narrative which highlights the active role of the Palestinian people in crafting their own history. Presently absent from the global Palestinian narrative are stories of resistance, persistence, and hope, which Palestinian Journeys strives to bring forward.

Palestinian Journeys is a project of the Palestinian Museum, in collaboration with the Institute for Palestine Studies and Visualizing Palestine. Beyond that, Palestinian Journeys strives to tell a comprehensive Palestinian narrative through a growing pool of collaborations and partnerships with kindred projects, institutions, and groups which produce knowledge on Palestine and the Palestinians.

The online platform is currently divided into two parts: the “Timeline,” and the “Stories.” The Timeline content is an original creation of the Institute for Palestine Studies, while the Stories are original creations of the Palestinian Museum.

The Timeline is an ever-growing encyclopedic collection of historical events, biographies, themed chronologies, highlights of historical, socio-economic and cultural themes, historical documents, and multimedia. It serves as an indispensable scholarly reference for the breadth of Palestinian history.

The Stories shed light on hitherto neglected experiences of the Palestinian people. They capture marginalized and forgotten narratives, weaving together the rigorously historical and the intensely personal in a compelling storytelling style.

As a user, we’re taking you through layers of experience as you surf from one part of the platform to the other, or dive deeply into its content. The journey can be heavily visual or primarily textual, inspiring you to explore that which you know, and that which you never knew existed.